Advances in semiconductor manufacturing and circuit design technologies have enabled the development and production of integrated circuits (ICs) with increasingly higher operational frequencies. In turn, electronic products and systems incorporating such integrated circuits are able to provide much greater functionality than previous generations of products. This additional functionality has generally included the processing of increasingly larger amounts of data at increasingly higher speeds.
The processing of increasingly large amount of data involves converting and communicating the data into different protocols which are acceptable to individual interconnected devices. For example, a remote device that communicates data in a first protocol having an associated connector design may access a host device that uses data in a second protocol having a different connector design. Moreover, with the abundance of different types of interconnected devices, the number of data protocols commonly used is increasing.
To overcome the above stated problem of different data protocols, protocol converters are used, generally in the form of cables having embedded chips that convert between the two protocols and provide a connector for each protocol on the ends of the cable for connecting to devices having the respective protocols.